I kept doing this by hand for founder friends until I finally built a tool to do it for them
For the past few months I kept getting the same message from people around me. They had an idea but no clue what to do next. Research felt like homework nobody assigned, building a pitch deck meant staring at a blank slide for hours, and brand strategy felt like something only companies with agencies got to have.
A few times I just did it for them by hand. Pulled market data, wrote out a plan, built the slides myself. Took a full weekend each time.
So I built BrandClover to basically do what I was doing manually. You type your idea and get a full research report, market size, competitors, business model, target audience. Then a pitch deck in 2 clicks. It doesn't stop there, brand strategy and identity tools too.
I turned on billing today after building this alone for months. Now I need 100 people who are actually stuck at that "I have an idea, now what" point to use it, break it, and tell me what's missing.
It's free to try, trybrandclover.com, would genuinely love the feedback.
What stood out to me is that you automated a workflow you had already proven manually.
The harder challenge now isn't generating research or pitch decks. It's helping founders distinguish between outputs that look complete and insights that actually change what they decide to build next.
That's a fair point and honestly something I think about a lot. Right now the tool gets someone from nothing to a full report and deck fast, but you're right that speed alone doesn't mean the founder actually knows what to do with it. I'm hoping the Q&A part of the report helps with that, since it lets people dig into the why behind each section instead of just reading it and moving on. Curious if you've seen any product handle that gap well, generating good outputs but also helping people actually act on them?
Interesting.
Reading your reply made me think less about the skills themselves and more about what changes inside an agency once its operating knowledge no longer depends on individual people remembering how things are done.
I don't think I can explain that line of reasoning properly in a thread without oversimplifying it.
If you're open to it, what's the best email to reach you on?
Yeah happy to take this off-thread, that's a good instinct on something that needs more room than a comment box. My email is faseehyasin12@gmail.com, feel free to send whatever you had in mind whenever works for you.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
That's usually how the good tools start — you feel the manual pain yourself first.
Curious what "this" was for your founder friends: finding people to talk to, or something else? The hand-work part before you productize is often the real signal.
Good question. It was mostly the research and pitch deck side, pulling market data, writing out the business model, then building slides from scratch. You're right that the manual pain part is the real signal, I only realized how repetitive it was after doing it for the third friend. That's when it clicked that this should just be a tool instead of me doing it every time.
That's exactly the pattern — if you're rebuilding the same slides from scratch for every founder friend, it's probably a product.
Curious what the tool does end-to-end now, and whether your users still need to find their own customers after the deck, or if you're only solving the deck half. The distribution half is where I've seen most founders stall after "the product works."
Right now it's mostly the deck half, the report and pitch deck side. Someone gets from idea to a full report and a ready deck fast, but you're right that finding actual customers after that is still on them. I haven't built anything for the distribution side yet, that's a fair gap to call out. Are you seeing that as the bigger blocker than the research/deck part for most founders you've talked to?
Yeah — in my experience the deck stops being the bottleneck pretty fast. Once the story is clear enough to present, the stall is almost always "where do I show up this week" not "what slides."
Most founders I talk to who are past idea stage burn time hunting the right threads (or replying in the wrong ones), not refining positioning again.
Curious who your typical user is right now — still validating the idea, or already pushing for first paying users?
If it's the latter, I can run a small free sample: threads where people describe the pain your users hit, scored + draft replies (help-first, no links). Testing whether hunt-time is the gap worth building next on your side, or you stay deck-only. Either answer is useful.
Honestly can't say from real data yet, we don't have users testing this at scale so I don't want to claim that pattern holds for us, but it lines up with what I'd guess. And to be clear on where we're at, it's not just deck, we also do brand strategy and brand identity after that, so the goal is helping someone go from idea to an actual brand, not just a deck.
The hunting-the-right-threads problem is interesting though, that's actually a direction I'd want to explore eventually, not something we've built yet but worth thinking about. Right now we're mainly looking for people who have an idea but aren't confident enough to act on it, people who need to validate it first before they build. If you're open to it, I'd take you up on running that sample down the line once we have real users in that stage to test it against, appreciate you offering it either way.
makes sense — brand/identity before build is a different moment than "i have a product and need to find where buyers complain daily."
the thread-hunting angle really clicks once someone's already selling and doing their own community outreach. before that it's premature.
curious how your first validation cohort looks — are they mostly pre-product or already testing something live?
That's a fair way to put it and matches what I see too, right now most of our users are in that first moment, some pre-product, some already testing something live, so it's a mix, but definitely earlier stage than "hunting where buyers complain daily." That said, we don't see BrandClover stopping at strategy and identity, the plan is to keep helping people further along too, so I could see the thread-hunting problem becoming relevant down the line, just not the moment most of our users are in right now.
different moment in the journey. thread-hunting really clicks once there's something live to point at.
good luck with the early cohort — curious what pushes them from "testing" to "need customers now."
Good question, and honestly the answer is pretty clear on our end, it's once they get the full report and pitch deck and actually feel confident enough to launch. Before that they're still second guessing the idea itself, once the report and deck exist, the confidence shows up and they start moving toward actually needing customers. That's probably the exact moment your thread-hunting angle would start being useful for someone like that.